- Artist
- Dave Matthews Band
- Realse Date
- March 2001 (unofficially leaked)
The Lillywhite Sessions is my second favorite album [confusion.cc] by The Dave Matthews Band, my hometown band, and the second bootleg [confusion.cc] or unreleased album on this list. You can read the history of the album on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. I got my copy very early, I want to say even before it was released on Napster per the Wikipedia article, but I can’t recall for sure. I got access to the songs via a very short chain of people going back to the actual recording sessions in Charlottesville. I downloaded the songs from an FTP address a friend gave me and burned them to a CD.
I fell in love with this album immediately upon popping the CD into a player. The darker tones of many of the songs is what I love. This album is particularly heavy with the strings and horns that set DMB apart from most rock bands. LeRoi Moore brings an almost jazzy feeling to several songs. DMB has always been a jam band, their live shows filled with jazz-like improvisation —songs that are 5 minutes long on an album blossoming into epic 20 minute jams in a live setting— and this comes through even in the studios setting on The Lillywhite Sessions.
Many of the songs on The Lillywhite Sessions appeared a couple of years later on an official release, Busted Stuff. But, the polished versions don’t have the same power as the unmastered raw recordings of the original leaked sessions. The rawness works with the moody nature of the songs. And, anyway, a few songs never made it to official studio albums. To this day “Monkey Man” is unreleased.
I can’t provide an Apple or Spotify playlist, but someone posted the full album to YouTube: